Atlanta – May 2, 2018 – Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative (SVEC), announced that they had their first successful automated restoration occur on March 23rd, following the installation and implementation of their ADMS system provided by Advanced Control Systems (ACS).

Automated restoration occurs when there is a permanent fault on the power lines that results in a power outage, followed by a system automatically detecting the location of the fault, automatically performing switching to isolate the fault, then automatically performing switching to re-route power in order to restore power to those customers who
are out, but are not in the section of lines where the fault exists. Automated restoration typically restores power in less than 1 minute to those customers who are out of power, but not in the section of lines where the fault exists,versus the traditional restoration times.

Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative, in Live Oak Florida, is a not-for-profit cooperative that provides safe, affordable and reliable electric service to more than 18,500 member-owners in the Florida counties of Columbia, Hamilton, Lafayette, and Suwannee. The decision to implement an ADMS system was driven by the Cooperative’s commitment to continuous improvement of service reliability and outage restoration times for its members. “It is satisfying to witness the FDIR portion of SVEC’s reliability plan improve service to our member owners” says Kurt Miller, Director of Engineering for SVEC. “SVEC is looking forward to completing systemwide FDIR in 2019 with Volt/Var optimization and peak demand management to follow in 2020” says Kurt.

“The decision to move to an ADMS platform is a big decision for any utility” says Kevin Sullivan, CEO of ACS. “We’re honored that SVEC chose ACS as their partner in this eff ort, and it’s always exciting to see a utility reach the milestone of their first automated restoration. Now SVEC can look forward to vast improvements in their service reliability for years to come”.

About Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative
Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative is a not-for-profi t cooperative that provides safe, aff ordable and reliable electric service to more than 18,500 member-owners in the Florida counties of Columbia, Hamilton, Lafayette and Suwannee.
Headquartered in Live Oak, Florida, SVEC maintains over 4,000 miles of electric distribution lines and serves an area of about 2,000 square miles (1.28 million acres). SVEC’s wholesale power provider is Seminole Electric, one of the largest generation and transmission cooperatives in the nation.